“Here’s the latest,” Thomas said, pushing a newspaper across the kitchen table to Pippa. “Want to read it?”

“Not really,” she said. It was midnight, three days after the shrunken head had been delivered to the museum and two days after the old woman had fainted in the auditorium and subsequently taken a high dive off her balcony. Each day, sometimes several times a day, a new headline appeared in a larger and larger font on the cover of the Daily Screamer, all of them penned by the same Bill Evans whose pocket contents Pippa had correctly read.

MUSEUM OF HORRORS, they screamed, and ANCIENT AMAZONIAN CHIEF ENACTS REVENGE FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

“Go on,” Thomas said. “I’m the one who had to go fishing for the newspaper in Dumfrey’s office. I thought Cornelius would pluck my eyes out.”

Pippa sighed and cleared her throat. “‘New York contains many secret places and many deadly secrets,’” Pippa read, “‘but none perhaps so deadly as those concealed within the halls of Dumfrey’s Dime Museum. . . .’”

“Good opening,” said Thomas.

“Skip to the part where the old lady bites it,” Max said. Pippa shot her a withering glance and continued reading.

“‘The shrunken head of Ticuna-Piranha, a fabled Amazon chieftain, now sits among the exhibits at one of New York’s most undervalued museums. A hideous specimen, it is said that merely a single glance into the depths of Ticuna-Piranha’s eyes will curse the witness to a terrible fate—misfortune, illness, even premature death. This was proven true on Sunday morning, when Alice Weathersby, age eighty-two, plummeted to her death from her twelfth-floor balcony only hours after the head was unveiled. . . .’

“‘WHO WILL BE NEXT?’”

Pippa folded the newspaper, sighed, and picked up a crumb muffin. “It’s all a little mordant, don’t you think?” she said, taking a large bite.

“What’s mordant mean?” Max said without turning around. She was frying some eggs on the stove. Now she expertly flipped them.

“I think she means morbid.”

Pippa turned. Sam had just appeared in the doorway. His hair was, as always, a dark curtain in front of his face. He came in and took a seat at the table.

“What’s morbid mean?” Max asked, sliding her eggs onto a plate.

Pippa ignored her. “Someone died. And we’re all celebrating.”

“We’re not celebrating,” Thomas said. “We aren’t the ones rushing the doors every day, are we? We just live here.” He leaned over to pluck a bit of muffin from Pippa’s plate. “Did you know the probability of dying by a fall from an apartment balcony is one in four hundred and fifty thousand?”

“Mr. Dumfrey’s celebrating,” Pippa said, ignoring his last comment. She was annoyed that she couldn’t quite verbalize what she felt: there was something wrong about it. Earlier, she had seen the crowds swarming the display case that held the shrunken head, nearly toppling one another to get a better look, and she’d felt an instinctive revulsion, like when she saw alley cats fighting over a bit of rotten meat. There were many strange and gruesome things in the museum—the mummified big toe of an Egyptian pharaoh, the supposed eyeball of an actual Cyclops floating in a jar of formaldehyde, a baseball-size rock said to be the world’s largest kidney stone—but she thought the shrunken head, and all the clamor about it, was the worst.

“Well, it’s better than it was before, ain’t it, when hardly no one came at all?” Max said, breaking up the yolk of her egg with a spoon.

Pippa decided her question was so hopelessly ungrammatical she couldn’t possibly correct all her errors. So she just sniffed. “I’m not sure it is better,” she said.

“Do you think there’s something to it?” Max said. She had just stuffed her mouth with eggs, so it sounded more like do oo fink eres umefing to if, which was at least more grammatical than her last comment. “The curse,” she clarified, swallowing. “The old hag died, didn’t she? Maybe it’s true. Maybe the head is bad luck.”

“If it is true,” Sam said suddenly, “the curse will fall on us next.”

There was a second of silence. A shiver ran down Pippa’s back, as it sometimes did when she came across something unexpectedly cold or metallic or dangerous in someone’s pocket, like a knife or a revolver. She remembered what she had overheard Mr. Dumfrey say to Miss Fitch backstage, and Miss Fitch’s response: Let’s hope they’re safe. She hadn’t told the others yet—the shrunken head, and the death of Mrs. Weathersby, had driven the words straight out of her mind—but now she wondered whether she ought to. She nearly opened her mouth to repeat the conversation.

Then Thomas laughed.

“Seems like good luck to me,” he said.

Max finished her eggs and then—much to Pippa’s disgust—took the plate and licked it. “I’m pooped,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

But just then Pippa heard a noise from outside the kitchen: footsteps, descending from the first floor. “Shhh,” she said, at the same moment Sam said, “There’s someone coming.”

All of them froze. Pippa’s breath turned to ice in her throat. Please, she thought, please let it not be Mrs. Cobble. Or even worse, Miss Fitch. They were not supposed to be up, and they were certainly not supposed to be in the kitchen. But the footsteps kept going.

Thomas started to move toward the door.

“No, Thomas. Not yet,” Pippa whispered. But he had already cracked the door and peered into the hall.

“It’s all right,” he said, withdrawing his head. “It was just Potts, and he’s gone.”

The four of them—Pippa, Thomas, Sam, and Max—snuck upstairs together, with Thomas scouting by shimmying through the vents that connected the floors, then returning to report the coast was clear. By the time they arrived in the attic, they were near breathless with laughter and only just managed to restrain themselves. But then Sam bumped into Danny’s bed and the dwarf sat up with a roar, flailing his arms, shouting murder, and they dissolved into laughter again.

It was only two or three minutes from the kitchen to the attic—and yet it was the first time, Pippa thought, as she slipped into the clean white sheets of her cot, that she had ever felt as if she had real friends.

But just before she fell asleep she felt that sudden thrill of alarm that she hadn’t been able to express or explain, and she remembered what Sam said: The curse will fall on us next.